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Hester follows close behind Emily as they both swim down towards the hole again. They run into the piranhas Emily spotted earlier as they sink lower, but Emily quickly dispatches them all with a few casts of aqua bolt.

They arrived beside the mysterious tunnel to The Abyss without any problems and both sit on either side of it. Emily copies Hester in closing her eyes, leaving her scans running in the background to protect them as she turns her main attention to the feeds of her scouts on the surface.

It’s odd that we haven’t seen any bugs since entering this cavern: I would have thought there’d be a group or two in such a large space. Unless there’s something here they’re avoiding.

She takes one of her birds from its position on top of the barrier disc and angles it towards the ceiling. The thermal imaging provided by the pack strapped to its chest assists in seeing through the thick darkness coating the ceiling, but she doesn’t see signs of anything out of the ordinary.

Cautious, Emily keeps the bird trained on the cavern’s roof, a small nagging in the back of her mind reminding her about the screamers that caught her off guard on their first day back in the caves. She doesn’t move the bird closer, fearful of disturbing something she couldn’t protect the others from whilst at the bottom of the lake, but she does keep some of her attention watching just in case.

Hester remains locked in place, her eyes shut and her mana probing the hole as Emily watches patiently. After half an hour of waiting, Emily notices a disturbance in the currents around them. The water starts churning, being drawn towards Hester as her eyes flash open, a deep cerulean glow lighting them up for a moment.

The phenomenon quickly fades, and Hester rises from the lakebed with excitement.

“I did it!” she signs happily.

“Well done,” Emily signs back, kicking off of the rock below. “Let’s get back to the surface.”

They quickly swim up, breaching the surface and heading for the shore under the push of Emily’s magic. They rise out of the water into the boundary of their barrier, and the moisture falls off Emily smoothly. Hester takes a moment to conjure a dark blue magic circle that washes over her, cleaning her as well. She then turns to Emily with an excited grin, removing her Gills and hooking them onto her belt.

“I did it!” she repeats aloud, unable to hold in her joy.

“Ha,” Emily chuckles. “Let’s see then.”

Hester shuts her eyes and raises her hand, muttering “water” again.

Does the vocalisation help her focus?

Emily’s questioning halts as mana gathers before Hester’s hand. It coalesces into a glistening blue mass that slowly takes on the form of a dark, pulsing water droplet. The droplet swirls and roils with barely contained force, and Emily marvels at the deep hues displayed.

Fascinating. I can tell she still views water as violent waves, but it seems to focus more on the pressure at depth than raw power. I can almost feel the density of her mental image.

She claps her hands, breaking Hester’s focus, and is quickly joined in her applause by their friends who were watching a few metres away.

“That’s so cool!” Tom cheers.

“Well done,” Juliana says, the others quickly mirroring her in giving their congratulations.

After a few minutes of bathing in her achievement, Hester turns back to Emily.

“Now for ice,” she says with determination, clearly less certain about the coming attempt.

She shuts her eyes again, raising her hand and muttering “ice”. Slowly, pale, frosty wisps of mana form in the air, gently swaying in a non-existent breeze.

Emily smiles, summoning a sheet of paper, her quill, and a light sheet of metal from her belt. Her hand moves in a blur of motion as Hester finishes her display and opens her eyes, looking at Emily’s actions with confusion.

Before anyone can question her, Emily finishes and sends the quill and metal back into her storage. She holds the sheet of paper out to Hester, revealing the magic circle and chant drawn on it.

“Congratulations on becoming a dual elementalist!”

After another round of congratulations, their excitement dies down a little and they settle around the campfire again as Hester gets started on dinner. Emily takes the momentary respite to send two of her birds up into the looming darkness above, her curiosity getting the better of her.

One of the birds carries a thermal pack, and the other a light pack just in case. Her friends notice the moving light above and join Emily in watching the birds’ trip.

“What are you doing?” Juliana questions.

“Just checking the ceiling,” Emily explains. “The lack of bugs after we’ve been here for almost a day feels odd, so I’m wondering if there are some screamers or something up there keeping them at bay.”

The birds breach the thick shadows stretching down from above, revealing a dense mass of stalactites. They sweep past, with nothing showing up in thermal sight, but Emily spots several holes dug into the hanging spikes of rock.

Something’s living up there.

She keeps the bird with a light pack a little way back as she sends the other closer to one of the holes to inspect. The moment the bird lands on the edge, a flash of orange shoots out from within, smashing into the delicate mechanical scout, breaking the array Emily’s watching through and sending metal pieces flying.

Juliana lets out a sad noise as the bird is obliterated, and Emily’s face falls into a harsh scowl as she glares at the screamer who did it.

“Tsk,” she clicks her tongue, growling in anger. “They killed one of my babies.”

She has the other bird quickly pull back, flying after the scattered magic crystals from its destroyed partner and grabbing them in its talons before gliding away uncontrolled as Emily starts casting. The screamer shrieks at the top of its lungs, alerting its colony to the threat from below, but Emily and her friends only have to deal with a slight ringing in their ears thanks to the distance separating them.

Before they can even start preparing for a fight, Emily’s friends let out sounds of disbelief as a wave of warm mana floods out of Emily, bringing sweat to their brows. Eight large, cracking orange and white magic circles spin to life above them as Emily pours all her focus, and almost forty per cent of her mana, into a single barrage.

The screamers scramble about in the darkness above, preparing to attack, but the sounds of their clawed wings scraping against the rock are drowned out by the sizzling fireballs raging away below them. Emily releases the fireballs in one go, sending the flaming volley into the roof with a vindictive grin.

“Boom,” she mutters with a hint of grim satisfaction as the ceiling is illuminated in a bright flash of heat.

Eight concussive blasts meld into one, blanketing the screamers in fire and disintegrating the stalactites they lived in. The cavern shakes as flaming rocks and scattered body parts fall into the lake, sending waves crashing against the shore. Emily protects their camp with a wall of stone as her friends look on, stunned.

Nobody says a word as the shaking subsides and the last remnants of the screamer colony sink into the water below, bringing silence to the cavern once more.

“That,” Dante says after a few moments, turning his gaze on Emily, eyes shining with admiration, “was incredible!”

Her other friends give similar reactions, agreeing with him and looking at Emily with a mix of respect, admiration, and a hint of fear.

“Why didn’t you do that when we were fighting those burrower ants?” Tom asks, glancing at a scorched, bloody wing floating by the shore beside Emily’s boat.

She shrugs, standing up and walking over to inspect the damaged watercraft.

“As you can probably tell, blowing them to smithereens makes it pretty hard to harvest usable materials,” she says, picking up the boat and turning around. “Also, that single volley used a lot more mana than if I’d dealt with them slowly, and I can’t cast that many spells while doing anything else. It’s a matter of efficiency.”

“Fair point,” Tom says with a hint of disappointment.

“Personally,” Ivor signs, glancing up at the roof, the damage hidden by the returned darkness, “I’m glad she isn’t repeatedly trying to bring the cave down around us.”

Emily laughs as she sits back down against Juliana, taking out a few tools to clean up the dents and scratches on the boat caused by crashing into her stone wall. The surviving bird flutters down, dropping a wind and a fire crystal in Emily’s lap before landing on Juliana’s to let her pet it.

Emily returns the boat to the water fully repaired as Hester serves out dinner. They eat and then turn in for the night as the glow of the lake fades away, dropping the cavern into darkness. Emily and Juliana are once again left together under the light of the array disc, Juliana leaning her head on Emily’s shoulder and watching as Emily deftly weaves metal pieces into the parts for another bird.

A short while after everyone else has fallen asleep, Emily breaks the comfortable silence to ask a question.

“Hey, Jules?”

“Yeah?” Juliana responds softly, not taking her eyes away from Emily’s work.

“Are you scared of water?”

“Ah,” she squeaks, her face flushing in embarrassment.

Emily giggles, placing a kiss on Juliana’s head before leaning her cheek against her.

“It’s okay if you are,” she reassures her gently, pausing her hands and putting away the gearbox she was working on.

“A little bit,” Juliana quietly admits, turning to wrap her arms around Emily’s waist and trying to bury her face in her shoulder.

“A little bit?” Emily coaxes, turning and pulling her girlfriend into her lap.

“Well, I’m not quite afraid of water itself,” Juliana explains, relaxing into Emily’s body. “I’m afraid of the deep.”

Emily silently strokes her hair, waiting for her to continue.

“When I was little, my mum used to take me on trips to the beach. We have a few beautiful beaches in our territory where you can see the water stretch out into the horizon and meet the sky. I loved it. I’d always ask, every time we went, if I could go for a swim. I wanted to try and reach where the sky touched the sea,” she explains with a wistful longing in her tone. “But, mum always said it was too dangerous because monsters lurked in the water. So, on one of our trips when I was eight, I snuck away when she was distracted. I swam out into the water as far as I could. Mum noticed me pretty quickly and sent some guards after me, but I kept going.”

She pauses, shivering slightly and taking a moment to calm down. Emily pulls back a little, sending her body armour into her storage before putting on a spare shirt and pulling Juliana back into a softer embrace.

“It wasn’t a monster that attacked me,” she continues quietly. “It was the water itself. I hit a strong current and it pulled me under. I tried to fight it, to swim back to the surface. But I was too small and weak. I just kept tumbling down, falling into that horrifying nothingness below. Luckily, the guards reached me and pulled me out before I could drown, but ever since then I can’t stand looking into water and not being able to see the bottom.”

Emily feels a damp patch forming on her shirt, so she pulls Juliana in tighter, offering her silent reassurance.

***

The next morning, they rise early and check on the Diver. The dots on the receiver tablet have shrunk to the size of a fingernail, sitting an arms-length apart with one lower than the other while ever so slowly creeping apart further.

Good, it’s still moving.

They eat breakfast and break camp before lining up with the direction of the lower dot, pointing them towards a tunnel on the far side of the cavern from where they entered, and marching forward. They enter the tunnel with high hopes and an air of excitement, keen to uncover a never-before-found secret, but the air slowly grows stale as the days go by.

The tunnels continue on much the same as before, as they fight off small groups of bugs and creatures, letting Emily wipe out any fish before they can cause trouble. They find herbs and magic crystals to harvest along the way, and a few small lakes, less than half the size of the first. The dots on the Diver’s receiver are always moving, even after it should have run out of power, giving Emily hope that it’s being pulled by the current towards their target. It occasionally visibly speeds up or slows down, creeping slowly lower, but never coming to a halt.

They repeatedly switch between connected streams of the river under Emily’s guidance, trying to follow the dot’s path as closely as possible without wasting time. However, two and a half weeks after leaving the first lake, Emily’s friends start to lose hope in her theory.

“We’re back here again,” Tom grumbles, looking around the five-way junction they left four hours ago.

The junction has three branches of the river flowing into it, and two flowing out, creating a churning of conflicting currents that clash against each other. Surprisingly, the maelstrom doesn’t affect the surface of the water much, but the fog just below it violently thrashes about, belying the deadly flow that forced Emily to remove her boat from the water temporarily.

“The vertical distance between us and your Diver has only been increasing for a few days now,” Hester adds. “And I don’t think that’s because your Driver’s dropping faster.”

Emily shrugs off their grumbling and points towards the path they haven’t yet followed downstream of the junction.

“I never promised it would be fast,” she says as she casts a spell to form a small bridge of stone over the river. “We may not even be on the right path and could end up having to backtrack a few days to keep making progress for all I know. Have patience.”

No one else complains as they set off down the new tunnel and, after three hours of walking, they see something that instantly reignites their hope. Standing before them, carved into the wall alongside the river, is a large, ancient-looking doorway. The doors are a dark, shimmering metal that looks like it will vanish into the ether when night falls. The frame around them is a worn, faintly glowing, silver brickwork with jagged runes carved into the face of each brick.

“Woah,” Juliana gasps in admiration at the mysterious door. “Is that the path we’re looking for?”

“I think it’s a dungeon,” Enzo responds, his excitement palpable and quickly spreading to the rest of the group at his words.

Emily steps forward, placing a hand on the worn brickwork. The moment her hand makes contact with the cold stone, she feels a flicker of mana lick against her palm, and a deep pulse floods through the door. The dull runes suddenly come to life, pouring out blue light as they shift, sliding across the stone to reposition.

She steps back to rejoin her friends, a silver magic circle forming behind her as she prepares a defensive spell, just in case, and her hand resting on the Spitter. The runes find their new places and pause, before twisting into a new form. Slowly, they turn into words Emily can understand, and an excited smile parts Emily’s lips at the revealed message.

Enter, foolish challengers, the trial of the divided.

Slay everything that blocks your path and your reward shall be provided.

The doors suddenly shake, peeling apart and silently gliding open on their own, welcoming them to the trials ahead.